Food & Drink

Lemon Posset

I am renowned at The Arundell for my sweet tooth and my love of desserts, and with warm weather and the scent of summer in the air, there is nothing more quintessentially British than a lemon posset for dessert. In our restaurant, we serve ours with meringue and a gingerbread ice cream. We use a mould to create a lemon shaped posset, but it works just as well in a glass or a small pot. However you serve it, just enjoy - it’s absolutely delicious! Ashley Wright, Head Chef at The Arundell

Ingredients

850g double cream 250g caster sugar Zest and juice of

six lemons

Method

Put the double cream and sugar in a large pan. Bring it slowly to the boil and then simmer for a few minutes.

Add the zest and juice from the lemons. Mix it with a whisk and simmer the mixture until glossy. Strain the mixture and pour it into glasses, pots or even small bowls. Then leave them in the fridge to set for approx. 6 hours.

A quick guide to sweet wines and sweetness in wine

Let’s start by clarifying what a dry wine is. Wine is made by mushing up (technical jargon!) grapes. Yeast then eats the sugar in the grapes, turning it into alcohol. If all the sugar is eaten, the wine is ‘dry’ meaning it has no sweetness. This is different to the dry sensation tannins create in your mouth. Coming from grape skins, stalks, seeds and sometimes from oak barrels, tannins can help age wines and are mainly found in red wine - they are more of a texture than a flavour. If a customer asks for something ‘not too dry’ they normally mean something with low tannins. To make wine sweet, you stop the yeast from eating all the sugar (for example by filtering it out) so the remaining sugar provides sweetness. Sugar or concentrated grape juice gets added sometimes, but usually with cheaper products - this is called chaptalisation (because in the wine world everything needs a fancy word!). Most confusion around HOW sweet wine is, arises from the numerous - not always helpful - terms in use. Some are ‘official’ terms used in the trade, while others have been invented to try and describe sweetness in layman terms. When faced with a wine list, ‘offdry’ means there is a little sweetness in a white wine, whilst ‘medium sweet’ is used to describe reds with some sweetness. Why? No idea. You may hear other terms such as semi-sweet, semi-dry or medium. It’s unnecessarily confusing, so most wine lists have a 1-5 scale of sweetness to help you! Within ‘sweet’ there is still quite a range, so here are some clues. Lighter sweet wines are usually paler in colour with lower levels of alcohol. Ice wines may be as low as 6%; wines such as Rutherglen Muscat are deeply coloured and around 17%; fortified wines have spirit added to them and usually start at 20% ABV. There are many different styles of sweet or dessert wines, made in wildly different ways! Ice wine involves letting grapes freeze on the vine, then crushing them to remove the water, leaving a concentrated and incredibly pure juice. Rutherglen Muscats are made in Australia in furnace-like sheds! Both are delicious but very different. The epitome of dessert wine making involves a form of grey rot! Botrytis Cinerea is a form of rot that coats grapes, gently piercing the skin and allowing water to evaporate. The grapes become raisin-like and have to be picked laboriously by hand to separate them from ‘healthy’ grapes. Unique conditions are needed - the vineyard must be misty in the mornings and bright and sunny in the afternoons. Many of the world’s most famous dessert wines are made this way, Sauternes and Tokaji for example.

Dave Anning

Devon’s Finest

Delicious dining every day, with the fi nest ingredients sourced from Devon.

The Bedford Hotel

www.bedford-hotel.co.uk 01822 613221